


here hung those lips

by stclairvoyant



Category: Homestuck, Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alcoholics Anonymous, Canada, F/F, Gen, Particularly Nasty Deaths, Québec
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-05
Updated: 2014-12-05
Packaged: 2018-02-28 04:56:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2719487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stclairvoyant/pseuds/stclairvoyant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the absence of family, the presence of friends, and the young life of Roxanne Strider-Lalonde.</p>
            </blockquote>





	here hung those lips

**Author's Note:**

  * For [negativecosine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/negativecosine/gifts).



> Original prompt: "I'd love to see (an AU with) Roxy as someone's sponsor in AA, or supports someone through recovery in some way."
> 
> When I read this first, my mind jumped immediately to the absurdist world of Infinite Jest for this story. I've tried to make the story transparent to people who aren't familiar with it at all, though there are plenty of easter eggs for people who have managed to slog all the way through the book! To those of you who haven't, a few words of advice: read the footnotes! The footnotes are very important. Just like much of the book, Infinite Jest, much of the important events that occur in this little story happen offscreen, and rely on the imperfect, incomplete reconstructions of witnesses and second-hand accounts.

* * *

 

**Pre-dawn, 4 May, Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken, At the Perimeter of the Great Convexity Facing Pointe-Claire, QC**

Back when Roxanne "Rogue" S.-L.—"Rogue" being the sort of fangless sobriquet you'd earn at an institution like Double-H, itself another one of the self-employed names for the Heritage Home Alcohol Recovery House, but like which nevertheless carries the ponderous expectation that it be carried forward into the future like the weighty piece of baggage that it was, viz. its declaration to all those vested and conversant in the vocabulary and the culture of A.A. groups anywhere (not simply the Canadian ones, Roxanne'd learned, after weathering the trip from the northern fringes of the Great Convexity1 to Ft. Ticonderoga, one exceedingly nasty jaunt from one Lucite-walled side of the blasted wasteland to another) that one has a History, and which honestly she'd grown sick of hearing of by the time the first fortnight of newcomers had Joined The Ranks since earning, in retrospect probably having something to do with the eye-rolls they spat it out with, like they couldn't believe their misfortune at landing themselves in a place as intensely earnest as Double-H, let alone trundled through miles upon miles of fulvous fumes and feral, abnormally multiply-eyed children2 only to share their space with a house full of Nucks, but which she'd grown inured to, the nickname, as a result of years of pathologically frequent contact with the sedulous sincerity of a place like Double-H—back when Roxanne had just Joined The Ranks of Double-H for the first time, this probably being around the Year of the Whopper or so, or at least right around the introduction of Subsidized Time, anyway, she'd kind of disavowed political participation like this here, _this here_ being her own mind's mental abbreviation for taking in the sights of freshly-elected Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe loosing an animal bellow as he expired before an audience of thousands—something that had doubtlessly already been covered by smug news outlets quick to leap on the news that another new face in Québécois politics had nevertheless already heard the squeak 3—but regardless the political participation found her tonight, such that she was struck with a powerful, painfully nostalgic urge to return to the Heritage Home Alcohol Recovery House. Heritage Home sat, or squatted, really, not far from where she was now, on the narrow barely-habitable strip between the southern bank of the _Fleuve St.-Laurent_ and the northern reach of the Great Convexity, its former foundations reinforced with lead-shielded concrete now, likely as a precaution against the threat of encroaching waste but possibly, Roxanne had to consider, it had always been that way, straddled since its B.S. 4 inception on this embattled land, waiting for the inevitable day when its nuclear bunker would prove necessary for the survival of the Ranks held within. Perhaps the nostalgia was a simple response to the roil of insecurity filling her on a night like this, what with a prominent O.N.A.N. opponent being presented rudely and quite hastily with a one-way ticket to the pearly gates, for her to want the trappings of safety in the fortified halls of Double-H, the absolutely ludicrously bomb-shelter-like edifices of the good old _Maison de Récupération_ , which, if she was being honest with herself, was more of a psychological comfort than anything; the story was, anyway, the A.F.R.'s would go out of their way to bend the rules of reality to terrorize even the most loyal of Canadians. Which, Roxanne supposed, on a night like this, taking into account her full, unimpeded view of the Bloquiste's unceremonious squeak-audition, would include her.

It wasn't an assumption she'd always have made, about being a Canadian, certainly not with half her family being the type to mutter "Nucks" dismissively whenever they were faced with some kind of conflict for which a Northerly scapegoat could conceivably be conscripted—which, if perhaps fair, due to personal-type experiences with the aforementioned legless insurrectionists and their tendency to extinguish dearly-beloved family members in the ensuing chaos of an execution job thereof, also did nothing to convince her mother, Roxanne's mother, something of a respectable essayist largely on the topic of O.N.A.N.ite response to notionally pan-Canadian resistance ultimately almost laughably confined to the borders of the Québécois nation, truly only excluding in any meaningful sense the actions of the Calgarian Pro-Canadian Phalanx (an exclusion that in truth would only outrage the odd Montana rangeland rancher long-suffering under repeated Phalangeal incursion), that any seriously mounted effort to mend the Great Schism splitting the family neatly in two would succeed, probably also acknowledging heavy-heartedly and acceding to the tragic fact that the perseveration of this domestic disunion would only exacerbate the kind of cavalier references to "Nucks" that persisted on the patrilineal line. But so anyway, despite a rather unambiguously south-of-the-border upbringing in Rainbow Falls, New York5, due to its subsequent inundation with vast quantities of carcinogenic substances and ensuing epidemic of newborns suffering from what even well-respected medical journals did not have the dignity to label anything other than "enormous teratomas of the face" and eventual cleaving of it and everything within a hundred miles to its northern neighbour, she'd been compelled to fall back on her mother's own Canadian heritage to avoid the otherwise-inexorable statelessness of residence within the great blasted _terra nullius_ her hometown and its environs had just become, aided, no doubt, by the fact that at the announcement of the Reconfiguration in question she'd been visiting at her grandparents' Chelsea, QC home on semi-permanent leave from university thanks to the Unresolved Personal Crisis that would result in her eventually taking the leap and Joining The Ranks of Double-H. It hadn't particularly had anything to do with her political leanings yet, which, torn as they were between the ingrained casual suspicion on the part of the American contingent of her lineage with the dealings of their northerly neighbours and her mother's gradual radicalization from a disinterest commentator on the dynamics of B.S. Canadian-American relations into a habitual lampooner of the vagaries and immediate consequences of Territorial Reconfiguration's effect on intra-O.N.A.N. political conflicts and eventually into an activist 6 nothing more than a pair of leg amputations removed from membership in the A.F.R., remained more or less ambivalent even to this day, to a certain extent, but had been instigated, the Personal Crisis in an alarmingly incomplete state of resolution, by the culmination of several years of the psychosexual imbroglio that maturation under a household headed for more than three seconds at a time by—if one could imagine it—both Rosaline Lalonde _and_ David Strider and besides whose flirtation with anti-confluential filmography as a medium for expression and more specifically ambiguously romantic overtures to its forerunner and oft-cited maestro James O. Incandenza before their public and violent dissension over the legitimacy of its (un)natural development-cum-deterioration-cum-distillation into the genre of Found Drama 7 had precipitated at least part of her family's inevitable descent into incorrigible fracture, and probably also playing its part in contributing to the Crisis—though in as more of a spark in the metaphorical powder keg role with an only tangential association to the root causes of the problem in question—was the particular one-on-one nature of the relationship between her and the boy her mother'd never mention by name but would refer to only as "your own artistic endeavour into a zealously anti-confluential performance of the Electra complex," something which Roxanne had always resented not so much because of how egregiously anti-familial it was but more because of her resolute attitude that it was flagrantly false, apart from, of course, her own A.E. into Z.A.P.O.T.E.C.'s tendency towards self-absorption but which was not at all an uncommon personality trait for an O.N.A.N.ite citizen even in the latter days of the B.S. era. Either way, the resulting consequences of the Crisis, in Roxanne's imagination anyway, had had more of a profound influence on her political affiliation than on the sexual Freudian-stage-progression her mother would later describe as "Plath-like"8. So it was probably more or less a direct effect of the latter days of the Personal Crisis, as it was nearing a kind of abortive anagnorisis, that Roxanne would eventually find herself back where she started: at a Bloc Québécois rally so intensely infested with violent, politically radical amputees that there was no way its leader would not be made intimately aware of the squeak at one point or another.

In the end, Roxanne thought it was kind of inevitable that she'd end up back at Double-H; the tenor of the evening having long degraded into the shameful self-indulgence of a crowd whipped into a mortal frenzy by delivery on the promise of bloodsport, she figured it was only a matter of time either until the intoxicating allure of dipping into the sauce overcame her already-weakened will, resulting in quite possibly a catastrophic relapse into use of the very Substance9 she'd spent almost three straight-laced years doing her very best to avoid, or else take the short trip to the miserable acid-rain suburb of Manchester, Québec where Heritage Home Alcohol Recovery House had persisted—through a solid four years of Experialist ruin and its concomitant mortiferous clouds wafting on a sullen and unceasing wind from the south—in providing its services sickeningly bereft of guile, each long-suffering staffer probably years too late to avoid a miserable, grisly cancerous fate but also still emblazoned with a distressingly honest smiles after in some cases in excess of twenty years of experience dealing with members Joining The Ranks hefting some intensely momentous baggage.10 And the matter of time instigated by Duceppe's keen and thorough perception of the squeak concluded at 5:05 A.M., this May 4 in the Y. of the P.Wc., when Marie-Madeleine Roxanne Strider-Lalonde reached the door of the Heritage Home Alcohol Recovery House for what felt like the first time, all over again.11

 

* * *

 

**8 August, Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, 1100 metres up in the Superstitions**

Far below, Mesa and Scottsdale and the miserable suburbs of the Big City—David called them "Phoenician," knowing it drove Roxanne crazy—all of the Salt River Valley burned in the torturous heat, and even David, these days, considered it excessive, despite his extraction being as it was originally from B.S. Mexico in a similar kind of desert terrain, such that he'd experienced plenty of days in the midst of an identical unreasonably ferocious summer, which is why from about May to September every year he would either quit the area entirely, for New York or Buenos Aires or in a few particularly spitefully pyretic years Iceland, or else when truly compelled to be in the general vicinity of the golden light of the B.S. Sun Belt otherwise known as and more commonly these days the O.N.A.N.'s As Seen On T.P. Belly Burner™ Weight Loss Belt he would stay up here, high up in the Superstition Mountains, where he'd stay at a Norwegian deep-tissue therapist's ranch house and have the everliving shit massaged out of his shoulders. As it peaked around 45° C in the low, flat pan, it stood at a seasonable thirty-five up here, which was really more to David's speed, even if Roxanne with her northerly predisposition heckled him for finding anything north of about thirty to be to his taste, it being far beyond her ability to consistently tolerate; but either way that kind of dialogue was nothing new to them—it was a common playful sticking point between him and her, though no matter how lighthearted its intent might have been it always left them somewhat at cross purposes—and therefore as Roxanne sat in the foyer of the Norwegian's open-plan home waiting for her father's four-hour hot stone or shiatsu or Swedish massage or some kind of massage session to come to a close, she nevertheless spied him by the indoor-outdoor jacuzzi in a position that only David could deny as compromising with the massage therapist, and so her only rhetorical recourse was to yell across the room: "Hot enough for you? "

"Jesus Christ. Rox, what the _hell_?"

"You're already five hours into your four-hour massage."

David scoffed, but his eyes reflected that nevertheless he recognized that he would be forced to reckon with his daughter's stubborn intent to cut off his access to the Norwegian therapist's thorough muscle-tenderizing services. He picked up a towel, and draped it over himself with a sad heave of resignation. "Not according to Nuck Standard Time, where I'm incidentally none of your goddamn business hours in. "

"I'm going to have to object to your use of the term _Nuck_ , Dad."

"What's with the peanut gallery today? Okay, fine, not according to _Séparatisteur_ Standard Time. Didn't Québec just switch their official timekeeping to some hellish metric-type system with a hundred minutes to the hour anyway? As your people would say it, _je ne suis_ barely _deux_ fucking _heures_ in."

"And _Séparatisteur_ isn't even a word. Didn't the old Maman teach you a word of _la belle langue_?"

"I did my best not to let the lessons take, to avoid the whirling shitstorm of the Department of State for Canada catching wind and subjecting me to the bureaucratic-fucking-boondoggle-cum-agonizing-credibility-aneurysm of involuntary language-accreditation and subsequent requirement by the O.N.A.N.F.L.A.G.-E.P.F.L.O.N.A.N.12 to remake half of my catalogue or otherwise come up with at least six Francophone films within the year and failing both of those to face year after year of audits and hearings until death would take me, either at the merciful hands of a bunch of paraplegic killers or through the interminable, excruciating wringer of their pressure campaign."

"I've got half a mind to file an anonymous report on you right now," Roxanne says. "But either way, I'm surprised to hear you joking about it so soon after how everything went down with your filmmaker bromance buddy."

"Shit, no, it's no joke, Rox, some of those Québécois movie thugs have been circling like fucking vultures over the prime rib carrion of the rights to Incandenza's film catalogue. For all that they have a couple lawyers parked outside the warehouse with every single unsold InterLace cartridge of 'It Was A Great Marvel That He Was In The Father Without Knowing Him' primed and ready to coldly and brutally reverse-engineer his final publication, translating it into a Nuck simulacrum"—Roxanne shot him a sullen look—"sorry, a Québécois simulacrum, a French-language version regarding which I'm honestly not sure whether they're revelling deeply in the poetic irony of their quixotic quest to translate a silent movie into something more genuinely reflecting the requirements of a discerning separatist Canadian populace or whether they honestly think the stink of Anglophone entitlement is so overpowering that their only recourse is to forge a shot-for-shot remake with homegrown actors while holding a gun to the head of the Man Himself's estate, the way I've heard it is that they've also been searching for a copy of the last work the guy made. Heard some noises from sundry extremist amputees about the _samizdat_ , which seems honestly like a bit of an exaggeration if you ask me. The guy might have known his shit, at least until he decided that the apex of neorealistic filmmaking was to play darts with a phone book and name whatever sad sack got the business end of a dart the protagonist of your drama, but bold dissident cinema it wasn't. Wonder what Mondragon13 has to say about it all."

"Probably that you're a paranoid asshole who got in one too many public feuds _qua_ come-ons with her husband for her taste. Also, I'm guessing, for Maman's taste."

"Okay, so in my defense, much as the therapist knows the way it's done, your serapic mother will remain ever after in my heart, even though she honestly probably was never much more than a pair of gruesome leg injuries away from card-carrying membership of the A.F.R."

"I think you mean _seraphic_ , unless you consider Maman an odds-on favourite to undergo some hellacious posthumous Hades-Demeter-style transformation, achieve resurrection, and get fuck deep into the fertility business."14

"You're missing the point, Rox. The point is this: even if you're unwilling to extend me the courtesy of presuming my eunoia due to your evidently unflinching belief that I have some unresolved hang-ups of my own about the circumstances of your mom—god, how would she put it?—right, of your serapic mother hearing the squeak, the fact remains that interrupting my four-metric-hour deep-tissue massage to throw the old rhetorical pigskin around on the topic of our family's splintering into irreconcilable pieces, some of which as I've mentioned have done some pretty thorough squeak-listening, is sort of gauche."

"Have you seen the _ONANtiad_ , Dad? Like given your own questionably erotic multimedia exordia to Incandenza, I would be surprised if you hadn't slavered over every last InterLace cartridge and supernumerary scrap of film reel published by the man, but then again this is also the guy who decided that drama was dead and the only logical conclusion was to rope a couple of his buddies into writing critiques for a film that didn't even exist, so maybe there's nothing more concupiscently freighted than destroying every copy of his work you come across."

"You know he released like fifty InterLace TelEntertainment cartridges alone."

"But so the story of the _ONANtiad_ goes like this, there's this fierce and fated but ultimately unfulfilled affair between President Johnny Gentle 15 and the wife of the Canadian Minister of Environment and Resource-Development Enterprises, who in a stroke of serendipity shares his intense paranoid phobia of disease, the wife, but whose husband, sensing some brutalrude propensity for misbehaviour and mischief between her and Gentle decides to carry out a malevolent, large-scale vindictive scheme to foil their henceforth only theoretical capers by hiring an unscrupulous Canadian yeast specialist to induce in his wife a more-or-less permanent infection in her nether regions, which of course leads her into a state of mad longing but also hygienic hysteria pretty much directly responsible for her decision to leap in front of the tracks of a Québécois bullet train, leading to predictable leg-loss and also its concomitant political radicalization. And then Gentle's left with pretty much nothing to do but exact his revenge on a massive geopolitical scale, hence the situation in which my hometown, home fries, home skillets, home slices, et cetera, and their idyllic forested surroundings have become a radioactive bad trip cleaved onto Maman's motherland."

"That's fucked up, Rox."

"And yet it somehow has remained _de rigueur_ for our conversations to wend around eventually right back to the old standards of Separatism and slash or grisly circumlocutions re: the ultimate fate of Maman."

"Can I ask, why the sudden visit, after five hundred twelve days of nothing? Especially if this is all we're going to be talking about. I'm working on a movie, you know."

"I'll be honest though, for all of the press it still gets, the _ONANtiad_ really wasn't his best work, even if we're gonna confine our criticism to the movies specifically topically relevant to the question at hand. _Violet City_ , now that was more conceptually sophisticated, though if we're being honest it probably could have benefited from being made by someone who wasn't a tremendous tightass."

"I've been trying to do something a little more autobiographical. My agent says after the sort of lowbrow JPEG compression artifact feature films with Dadaesque plots and absurdist acid trip montages and egregious character inconsistencies, there's nothing the public will eat up more than a high-concept story told from the heart and at least moderately related to a formative experience from your life."

"And you've decided that Maman's biting the dust is the perfect marketable moment."

"..."

"Jesus Christ, Dad."

"And you know my agent, right? Like you've met her, in all her beady-eyed, bone-rattling cackling glory? You can't just _not_ follow her advice. She says film a ten-year epic about a small, friendly civil servant in the post-apocalypse travelling through a world populated only by empty metal cans as he searches for the light of democracy in the form of a firefly that speaks only in morse code, I film the fucking epic."16

"..."

"And so she starts getting into this shit of like, tell the real story of the man behind the mask in the aftermath of the much-publicized misadventure of one D. A. Strider's17 estranged better half."

"..."

"And there I go all prepared to give her some kind of half-answer, and you can imagine how it would get me to do some hella cogitation on the subject, like for example could I properly do an autobiographical-type explication without truly having the full knowledge of the events requiring explication in the first place."

"..."

"For example, were you actually living in Québec then officially? Or was this one of those temporary refugee-status things when Gentle had just announced the Reconfiguration of the Great Concavity?"

"This is you asking me now."

"..."

"You know, I think it's better that you didn't go to the funeral, because sometimes I can't tell if you're wilfully being like this, or whether you honestly don't realize the extent to which you're an asshole."

"Don't make it like this for me, Rox."

"I'd filed for citizenship six weeks before. The passport wouldn't arrive for another two, so it was a tense time. Maman had fallen in tight with the radical groups, your Fils de Papineau18, your F.L.Q.'s, and so on, as she tended to do whenever she got tensed up by events beyond her control, and so as the stressors ratcheted up to an intolerable level and external as they were, there's literally nothing to be fucking done, for her or for any of her whack-job extremist buddies, who have been busy watching their homeland climbing the ranks overnight from the eightieth most polluted constituent state of the putative O.N.A.N. into the first, leapfrogging orders of magnitude and leaving even its territorially reconfigured neighbours far in the dust."

"So it wasn't official, then? Your citizenship?"

"The Papineau guys, they'd been contemplating things, in that way of contemplating where you've already really made up your mind and you're really just telling everyone else what the results of your independent Contemplation have been, and but so the gist of the matter is that one of them, Louise Wayne, whose husband was an ailing asbestos miner in the eponymous region, told her comrades in the Fils that she'd learned about a particular activity done by young miner-boys back in the young adulthood of her husband that they called _Le Jeu du Prochain Train_. For your francophonically feeble convenience, that'd be 'The Game of the Next Train.' And technically, it had always been official, thanks to some retroactive time shit that the government was pulling with a lot of these asylum cases, but technically- _technically_ , it wasn't official at the time, either. Take your pick."

"So, if I ask another question—"

"You wanted to know the story, right? The story of how Maman heard the squeak?"

"..."

"..."

"It was the train tracks, right?"

"Do you remember your oblique request for explication, Dad? Explication arrives at its own pace. Consider the explication as a train, separate still from an express or a slow-moving freighter. Its arrival is not measured in kilometres per hour but in the amount of bullshit standing in the way of its appropriate exegesis. Okay? Okay. The way _Le Jeu_ works is simple. In its original form, six miners' boys stand across from their respective railroad ties and stand in wait of an oncoming train. The parameter for victory in the game is to be the last to jump in front of the train, from one side to the other, unharmed. The first to leap across is regarded universally as a coward, and leaves in shame, and the second through the fifth lose, too, but it's a respectable kind of losing, and they can hold their heads high as they walk away. And the last to jump is the winner." 19

"Jesus."

"And so of course, when Mme. Wayne suggested a test of wills among the fellow Fils of Papineau, a challenge of her fellow Papineaux's resolve and devotion to the cause, there is no other choice but for her to suggest the old game of the miner boys' cult. And without speaking, they all know the score, and there they are, lined up on the fucking train tracks of the Québec Gatineau railway, waiting for the Explication Express to come within moments of fucking steamrolling them all."

"Jesus Christ."

"And see, the thing about it, the thing about the Fils' impromptu indulgence in _Le Jeu_ , is that unlike the miners' kids, who had all kinds of—well, traditions, traditions but also contingencies and provisions, however ghoulish, for the course of action to be taken in the event of the periodic maimings, the instant snaps of the neck, the full-bore manglings leaving late leapers in hundredths—"

"Good god, Rox."

"Is that the Fils had no such measures, such that were a late leaper to miscalculate the remaining time for the locomotive to interrupt their sagittal plane, instead of following a highly ritualized preordained set of behaviours, say, to rush the sagittally interrupted individual to the nearest hospital-type building, or else the morgue in the event of critical plane interruption, the Papineau guys just stood there transfixed by horror as they witnessed Maman, plane very much interrupted, and did nothing."

"And then you—"

"Found her, Dad, I found her like an hour later dead but otherwise in a prime state of candidacy for the A.F.R.! And it isn't my fault that I wasn't there, wasn't conscious enough at six in the morning20 to listen for the keening fucking call of the Québec-Gatineau railway car across the street preparing unwittingly for Wheelchair-Assassins-style extemporaneous leg surgery, or make the extensive cognitive leaps necessary to know that Maman was slated to take part. And it isn't, isn't my fault that—"

"That what?"

"That's just what Dirk said to me, you know, when he did this whole song-and-dance for the first time. He had been swallowing books on grief therapy since like within hours from when he heard for the first time. He was quoting fucking Kübler-Ross21 at the funeral—you know, even he came to the funeral, Dad, and I'd pinned him at like thirty-to-one odds?—and apparently like he knew something big was coming because he had done his reading on it, had memorized entire passages on Abrupt Pauses in High Affect Speech, like he'd been goddamn primed for this very moment, and here I am, the sucker, falling for his entire routine, coming apart at the seams for his own amateur manipulative grief schemata, and I went really quiet and looked away and said, that I'd been hungry."

"Come again?"

"God, sometimes you two really _are_ just the same. That's what he said. He'd lathered me up so deep into hysterics that I'd gone right around the bend again into this horrifying calm and so then I got really embarrassed about it all and I said nothing, I didn't mean anything at all, really, just that how as I'd been going outside that morning after realizing there was honestly fuckall in the house to eat, that there'd been this intense wafting aroma of bacon sizzling on a cast-iron pan, and that the resolution I'd made that I was going to walk right down to the diner down the street had been fresh in my mind, and that it definitely hadn't been my fault that the first thought overpowering my subconscious as I opened the door and looked south across the tracks had been—"

"Jesus, Rox, what?"

" _That something smelled delicious!_ " Roxanne screamed. "That there I'd been, preparing myself for a prototypically O.N.A.N.ite breakfast of two scrambled eggs and American-type bacon and Runner-Up-Product-of-the-Year Starbucks Barista Easy-Kitchen-Install Home Espresso Machine coffee, so that when I'd first noticed the heavy scent of half-cauterized henceforth supernumerary limbs on the breeze, that holy _shit_ did something smell _great_ was my reaction!"

The Norwegian deep-tissue therapist's ranch sat in silence until, as the night sky's pinpricks of tiny light came into view, a dazzle of stars reminiscent in David's mind to the long-gone discothèques of Val d'Or where he had first met his estranged and also late wife, they left together in Roxanne's aging SUV.

 

* * *

 

**Pre-dawn, 4 May, Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken, At the Perimeter of the Great Convexity Facing Pointe-Claire, QC, Still**

Heritage Home Alcohol Recovery House's location in Manchester, Québec was something of a fluke for various reasons, but first among them was probably the name of the town, sporting an unambiguously English name, despite its neighbours' colourfully Franco-Catholic-inflected toponyms, from the pedestrian Sainte-Catherine and Saint-Constant and Saint-Rémi and Saint-Michel and Saint-Édouard and Sainte-Martine to the more esoteric Saint-Chrysostome and Saint-Urbain-Premier and Saint-Étienne-de-Beauharnois and Saint-Louis-de-Gonzague22, and whose name, Manchester's, was either a perverse joke committed by a group of French-Canadians determined to mangle its pronunciation so far beyond recognition23 that no otherwise upstanding Anglophone Mancunian could conceivably recognize it as referring to their own town, or otherwise the artifact of a particularly hideous time in Québécois history, namely the time around the B.S. 1940s when such Anglophone titans as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Mackenzie King actively discussed the forcible dispersal and resettlement of French-Canadians throughout North America in order to assimilate them entirely. The second anomaly regarding Heritage Home was that despite its location in Manchester, a town whose ultra-modernist planned town centre had gone from Viljo Revell24 pilgrimage site into a collection of bombed-out concrete shells designated by Québec's Ministry of Public Security as "Chernobylesque" in their radioactive waste content, Double-H had persisted in providing its services as an alcohol rehabilitation program and had not only succeeded in this endeavour, but had grown from a minor outpost of a province-wide foundation into, paradoxically, its crown jewel, such that between the time that Roxanne had first visited the H.H.A.R.H. and her first return, today, in the early morning of 4 May, Y.P.Wc., the bramble of underground-bunker-reinforced hallways had grown from a convenient perk into the defining feature of the House, and upon her entrance, sleep-dazed and overcome by the existential exhaustion of witnessing the leader of the political vanguard of nonviolent separatism hear the squeak (despite his being guarded by a dozen units of the Domestic Detail's elite mounted Cuirassiers), she had been confronted with a tortuous, torturous sequence of pathways leaving her disoriented enough that within the hour, she had been shepherded into a beginners'early-morning meeting, with the hymnal ritual greetings and the First Name Basis emphasized as a technique for psychosocial bonding that creates just the kind of impersonal intimacy valued in A.A., the same kind of intimacy and the same kind of psychosocial bonding A.A. encourages to be made with a Higher Power, but so the outcome of all of this was that as she stood there, dumbstruck with perceptual overload, she felt this keen sense of _déjà vu_ extending even until now, bringing her back to the first time she met Callie.

Callie was this English girl, not Anglo or anything either like most of the fluent speakers getting corralled into the Québec A.A. system, but honest to god English, with the missing r's in her accent25 and the fiendish tea dependence and the pocket Jane Austen reader stashed in her purse and, Roxanne learned as they'd been getting to know one another, before any kind of motion towards the notion of her Substance issues, the lukewarm Labatt Blues26 she drank, and the novelty of the whole package, the unequivocal Englishness and the even more English attempts she made at quiet mostly nonverbal communication with the largely French-speaking populace, it coming right around the time post-Y. of the W. where Roxanne had really truly honestly made some manner of headway and progress at Resolving her Personal Crisis, at least the portion of it relating directly to her Substance issues if not so much the part governing her feelings of frustrated grief over the failures in engaging her brother in what had been intended as emotional bonding but was really nothing more than a glorified ersatz grief therapy session, and fuck if Roxanne honestly knew who was supposed to be one receiving the G. T. in that relationship, and that, too, had imbued her with so much toxic guilt that it had poisoned the well, so to speak, of her progress with her Substance issues, threatening to cause the entire foundation to crumble around her, but it had come at this unbelievably opportune time for Roxanne, the novelty, so that when Roxanne first spied Callie in a bar as she had been meticulously preparing to throw in the towel and relapse, instead of following through with her plan to get ripping drunk, she had found this English27 girl in the midst of what was presumably her own species of Personal Crisis also at least in part precipitated by an unhealthy relationship to her Substance of choice, and did not give into the overpowering pressure to partake but stayed with Callie (unwilling to leave, then, in the powerful euphoria that comes from drinking beyond one's tolerance) there until last call and then drove her straight to Heritage Home Alcohol Recovery House. And Callie, in her first moments there, in the ignorant bliss of inebriation, had wandered lost through those underground hallways, until she, too, had been brought in front of the panel of novice members to face her own issues, to Join The Ranks for her own dangerous relationship to her Substance.

Roxanne had a car, an old B.S. Toyota 4Runner she'd inherited through a long and circuitous family connection28 that was notable only in that its gas pedal and brake pedal had been replaced with hand controls, presumably for whatever unfortunate third-cousin-twice-removed had suffered leg injuries grievous and thorough enough to necessitate the retrofitting of his SUV, and though initially there was familial conflict over the nature of the vehicle, what with it pretty flagrantly, to David's eyes, being the former possession of and also possible premature recruitment drive for A.F.R.-type agents, eventually he'd relented and let Roxanne drive the thing, figuring especially that otherwise the hazards in trying to transport anything short of an armoured tank through Nouveau Québec would result in the presence of an unacceptably large number29 of six-eyed anencephalic children in his life, and anyway by the time Roxanne had actually had the opportunity or desire to drive the thing south, most significantly her summer spent in the Phoenician suburbs _et al_., David had honestly forgotten about the entire argument regarding its suspiciously anti-O.N.A.N. sourcing, such that now he regarded the idiosyncratic setup of the car to be, if not ideal, then at least something approaching endearing. Callie, uninitiated in the details of _Le Jeu_ or even more generally any of Québec's politically loaded historical association with legless extremists, found the car to be similarly charming, and adding that to the fact that she had not yet come to terms with O.N.A.N.ite right-hand tendencies, generally abdicated driving duties when she and Roxanne would leave Double-H _ensembles_ e.g. to indulge in massive doses of ice cream and/or coffee in the Big City 30 (Montréal, here, not Phoenix, the only other of the two Big Cities in Strider-Lalonde parlance these days), as was a common evening activity in Québec A.A. institutions, and in the forty-minute31 drives from Manchester to Centre-Ville they would talk until the sun sank to the greenish toxic clouds horrifically static over the Great Convexity, and then watch the sun set from Mount Royal, refracting through the sickly haze in a way that they thought was beautifully tragic, and then they'd stay there, under the light pollution and the acid-soaked thunderclouds, until curfew came around and they'd pile back into the 4Runner and go to ground.

The third irregularity regarding Heritage Home Alcohol Recovery House and its location in Manchester was that the peculiar angle between the persistent toxic clouds, the northern reach of the glass walls, and the sun meant that while the sun was above about twenty degrees in the sky, the light and heat came at them from every angle possible, peeling faint shadows from the ground and leaving its surroundings bizarrely bald and ice-free for essentially the entire year. A sweltering miasma overtakes the immediate environs and it hangs around long past its welcome, too, but in essence this kind of bizarre mirror-and-albedo-driven quirk of geography means that as Montréal labours under one metre plus of snowfall, the thermonuclear heat trapped in Manchester's thoroughly-irradiated ground and/or some as-yet unknown kind of geothermal property from the intense pollution keeps the town in the throes of a miserable, endless Thermidor (though Double-H had capitalized off this, and by the wholesale importation of soil from California could successfully grow various breeds of tropical fruit33 almost year-round). The small-scale horticulture meant that Roxanne and Callie would often sit out on the stoops of the apartment buildings on the downtown city streets in midwinter chewing on mangoes and passionfruits for the sake of sheer contrariness, and there they'd resume the conversations left to lie in peaceful silence after their long Mt.-Royal evenings, and as time removed Roxanne further from her mother's death she would talk about her to Callie, and though Callie obviously couldn't relate re: maternal sympathies for extremist groups (though if she's honest, given their easy rapport Roxanne had half-expected for Callie's parents to be a similar Separatist-Unionist odd couple, even if she didn't really know enough about the situation34 across the Atlantic to speak to the matter much), she had spent enough time in the O. of N.A.N. to develop some astute political theory regarding Québécois resistance, and so the two of them, Roxanne and Callie, they'd talk (more) about politics and families and their Substance histories and laugh and cry and hold each other close until the final days of the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad35 grew dark.36

 

* * *

 

**Year of the Chewable Ambien Tab**

Callie's snoring, all huddled up in the corner of the bed with at least like 85% of the completely contorted covers. The slow rising and falling of her breath is anything but rhythmic, gentle stutter-stop snores hitching on each inhale, which is cold comfort for Roxanne, left with just an afterthought of the bedsheets and a quiet slow-burning resentment at waking up divested of; it is also cold for Roxanne. Outside the apartment, located as it is in Montréal but outside the heart of the urban heat island, the temperature has cracked thirty below and, according to weather reports Roxanne'd checked the night before on the T.P., is projected to display little interest in rising just because the sun has; inside the apartment (but outside the covers) it's barely topping 10°C, thanks to a hopelessly outmatched radiator and a couple of slightly leaky windows pretty much turning the place into if not an icebox then at least permanently sub-refrigerated, and without the covers, for all that Roxanne likes to think of herself as sturdy-blooded, able to withstand the brutal, brittle cold and the ass-deep snowbanks of formerly upstate New-Y. and presently Nouveau-Q., something about the temperature when the sun goes down and the lights go out makes her a little bit bats37; but then when the temperature falls this low outside anyway it's so cold that the toxic fumes bound up in the piles of low nimbus clouds that hover at the edge of the Great Convexity begin to condense and fall onto the ground in an entirely new form of precipitation, coating the streets and the snow and the buildings and the cars with a tacky chartreuse chlorinated film, and though Montréalers mostly ignore it just the same as they always have with the clockwork November–April snow here at sunrise with the cold and the sallow, luridly unreal green clouds lurking within view Roxanne thinks she's going to lose it.

And that's when she looks at Callie again, placid, eyes shut tight, little smile tugging at the corners of her cheeks, and it's so different from the face she wore for so long, in the dark hoarse nights with both of them run ragged and like for a while when Callie was like deep in the shit of a bout of DTs and both of them this close to relapsing because of the stress and the worry and the sheer unbound terror that their own wills (given over as they had already been to the Substance) would collapse in on themselves and—perhaps most of all—that the support, the friendship, the _sponsorship_ would turn on a dime from being the place where they'd find strength in each other to their very downfall, a retreat into the safe downward spiral that goes down smooth until it's a pit of spikes at the end, the times when they counted their lives only days into the future, like they feared they couldn't promise to be there 38 longer than that, or that wherever they would be more than a week or so in the future wouldn't be worth being _in_ , but so they had been there, bound by this frosty paralytic fear that for all that they might hold onto each other to keep themselves from falling, that if one of them took a tumble that they'd both roll down the edge of the mountain into the abyss39, but so even while looking back on that, the bathos of their control and their confidence, this years-long blackout that included her mother's last game—and what a joke it was, in hindsight—there's also the now, years and years removed from the start of it all in Y.W., where she can look down and find Callie by her side and feel confident, finally, that the inky years of careful, wobbly footfalls are gone for good, and that instead of being rendered more fragile with one hand in each other's they're stronger, now, bright and young and pyretic, a pilot light, a blue star, an ageless fire at the gates of a frozen dawn.

The sun rises from under a green haze into the naked sky, and Roxanne can't help but crack a smile too.

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

1 This being the preferred term in Canada to refer to the wide swath of New England ceded from the United States to its northern neighbour upon discovering the presence of systemic pollution in the area and as part of the consolidation of the three North American Free Trade Agreement members into the Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.); though Ontario took to its newly acquired toxic hellscape like a good sport, Québec—impacted more primarily by the infestation of poisonous waste running contiguous to its border—has largely declined to acknowledge the handover of what the United States would have it call _Nouveau Québec_ , or otherwise the Great Concavity, resulting in e.g. the situation occurring 4 May, Y.P.Wc. in Pointe-Claire.

2 The children in question largely coming from, if you believe the reports, the cantons east of pre-Territorial-Reconfiguration Berlin, New Hampshire (or post-T.R. Nouveau Québec), where rumour had it a vast collection of leaking barrels of industrial solvents and hydrocarbons had been allowed to ferment to the point of absurdity; if you'd believe the 32-point tabloid headlines, newborns with six-plus eyes and "basically no skull" had propagated at numbers well in excess of the national average.

3 Already a popular euphemism in the elevated parlance of particular power players in Canadian (and in finer-grained detail, Québécois) politics to refer to such executions, in part no doubt inspired by the pledge of the _Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents_ (A.F.R., the infamous "Wheelchair Assassins"), a staple of violent anti-O.N.A.N resistance, to 'materialize, quote "as if from nowhere" unquote, masters of stealth, striking terror into prominent, Canadian hearts, affording no warning excepting the ominous squeak of slow wheels'.

4 Before Subsidization, referring to the years before the introduction of O.N.A.N.'s Subsidized Time policy.

5 Steadfastly marked La Chute d'Arc-de-Pluie, NQ, in most contemporary O.N.A.N. maps produced south of the border, one of a vanguard of place names being subjected to the overwhelming Experialist urge to reaffirm the Convexity's Reconfiguration to its northern neighbour.

6 Bloquiste and Péquiste at first, but with decided sympathies in her later years to the _Front de Libération du Québec_ (F.L.Q), and by Y.P.Wc. Roxanne figured if her mother had not already bit the dust as an indirect result of the intense politicking therein, after an event like Duceppe's election and his judiciously swift elimination at the hands of the A.F.R., she'd probably have bit the bullet and taken up the old M.-L. oath to fight for the F.L.Q. Roxanne herself had probably been more tempered by a desire to bridge a kind of gap between her mother's and her father's politics, but at a certain point there's no real middle ground in finding moderation between an Experialist true believer and a hyperviolent Marxist-Leninist _séparatiste_.

7 Later described by Phoenix Cardinals punter Orin Incandenza (son of the man himself) thus: "No see there weren't any real cartridges or pieces of Found Drama. This was the joke. All it was was you and a couple cronies like Leith or Duquette got out a metro Boston phone book and tore a White Pages page out at random and thumbtacked it to the wall and then The Stork would throw a dart at it from across the room. At the page. And the name it hit becomes the subject of the Found Drama. And whatever happens to the protagonist with the name you hit with the dart for like the next hour and a half is the Drama. And when the hour and a half is up, you go out and have drinks with critics who like chortlingly congratulate you on the ultimate in Neorealism." Excerpted from Helen Steeply, "The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Punter," _Moment Magazine_ , 3 November Y.D.A.U.

8 Even in figurative terms, Rosaline had been wildly off-base here; despite the ever-growing chasm in difference of opinion in the increasingly public and hideously intractable Strider-Lalonde feud, Roxanne had always carried on amicably with her father, a kinship more despite their similar personalities than because of it, a fact which probably had in fact bred considerable resentment between Rosaline and her daughter.

9 Though Double-H itself is primarily focused on alcohol, the frequency of multiple-abuse means that a fair number of the House's reassurances and psychological reinforcements are applicable more broadly to e.g. cocaine, heroin, and benzos.

10 Roxanne always said she could tell from the nickname that the more veteran members sported the precise quality of the Baggage in question they'd been dealing with. For example, her extended experience with a Japanese woman something like twelve years her senior who for unclear reasons had decided to forgo all forms of address other than "Ganja Princess," and when prompted to theorize on the possible repercussions of such a title she had segued into an extended metaphor on the character of marijuana use as a response to Substance addiction being "something like deciding that the DTs were a good time, really, as long as you exclude all the parts where you're shaking like a shit caked onto the end of someone's excessively hairy ass as they waddle in vain from one place to another, but like which this little asspatty is so desperate to stick to its ursprung as if it's gotten hells of tight in an emotional-type way, so much that you decide that yeah, you'll keep that little dingle around, and in fact probably circumscribe your entire existence around how hella stoked you are for your psychosocial bonding with it, the dingle, such that everything you say and do probably has at least some slightly-more-than-tangential relationship to the new Substance, because that's really what it is, if you're being forthright about it, just that you've traded off the decidedly physiological effect rubric for one where your psychology gets turned on its side and you spend the better part of the abbreviated remainder of your life if not dependant on your ever-increasing cirrhotic tolerance for alcohol then instead hinging on your intense psychical exigency for the Substance which is no longer booze but your old standby MJ, and so like with a nickname like that not only is it a candid reflection of the fact that the epithet was self-applied, one that kind of sadly bespoke the diminished inner life inherent in trading off one's alcohol-type Substance abuse for a similar type of dependency, but also a sobering portrait of a chemical whose irreversible consequences on the temperament could not be underestimated, to say nothing of the social ruin of toting around this little buttsicle and publicly treating it as if it were some kind of holy communion," and though to be perfectly honest Roxanne had barely made conversation with her, the Ganja Princess in question, she'd in this case been perfectly on the nose with respect to what kind of life experiences had led to her adoption of the nickname as not only a term of casual, tongue-in-cheek reference to her pastime but as a day-to-day way to refer to herself, those being largely the predication on dope, originally only of high quality but these days really of any quality at all, as a way to fill the void left by weaning herself off of alcohol, and in retrospect all of it had really lessened the lustre of weed for her, Roxanne, so much so that she had never tried it again after that.

11 Something of a bizarre coincidence that didn't strike Roxanne immediately, at least consciously, was that it had shared quite a number of similarities to the first time, taking place in the same half-light—in this case, the last rays of sun hidden behind a rapidly approaching dusk but looking much the same to her, in her Substance-affected state, so much so that when she had seen the 5:05 on her watch she'd assumed it was morning, anyway, though she'd have been fucked if she cared, but regardless it being the exact semianniversary, November 4th in this case, when she'd first set foot inside the doors of the light really had looked essentially identical.

12 The comically unwieldy bilingual acronym for the Organization of North American Nations Film and Language Apportionment Group – _Ensemble du Partage du Film et des Langues de la Organisation des Nations de l'Amérique du Nord_ , a group that since the thorough and utter bankruptcy of the province of Québec and subsequent withering away of the Québec Film and Television Council and the _Office National du Film_ had taken to terrorizing any and all filmmakers shown to have sufficient fluency in French into creating content featuring its native sons and language. Some consider filmmaker James Incandenza's suicide to have stemmed at least partially from the incessant, urgent pressure to create of retrospectively suspected O.N.A.N.F.L.A.G.-E.P.F.L.O.N.A.N. agent Joelle Van Dyne, and Strider, since the event still hauntingly recent, having occurred the first of April in the Y.T.-S.D.B., still felt—and would ever after feel, probably—a lingering, heart-attack paranoia that his similarly extended dalliance with a Québec-born-and-raised sometime-professor who, as if this were insufficient to condemn him in the O.N.A.N.F.L.A.G.-E.P.F.L.O.N.A.N.'s internal review-board kangaroo court, also sported a mere two generations of separation from the Mondragon family name, would result in him similarly harangued into creating a French-language film or else succumbing to the dark riptide of depression and suicidal ideation that would result.

13 Despite it having been years since Avril Incandenza had gone by anything other than her late husband's surname, it was an enduring tic of David Strider's to refer to her by her _nom de jeune fille_ , though even he couldn't place entirely why; later he'd suspect it had something to do with making even more explicit her association with Rosaline Lalonde, whose paternal grandfather had married the only daughter and heiress of its cadet branch. More perplexing, though, was his stubborn, resolute opinion that a surname ultimately of Spanish origin somehow reflected her French-Canadian origin any better than her adoptive Italian married name, or indeed simply "Avril," but then Strider's reluctance to refer to anyone by naked first name had been long documented; indeed, one of the other precipitating factors to the dividing line in the Strider-Lalonde clan and subsequently to Roxanne S.-L.'s Unresolved Personal Crisis had been her father's unwillingness to refer to her by her full and Christian name, or indeed by anything at all more than "Rox," a name homonymous with her mother's geode collection, largely termed "rocks," comma box of, and therefore leading to the kind of breathless, hysterical arguments beginning from Rosaline's proclamation that surely there were more dignified ways to refer to her daughter than to call her by the same name he called her assorted and mostly ironic assortment of gemstones.

14 Referencing the syncretistic Greek-Egyptian god Serapis, created from the merging of the gods Osiris and Apis in the third century B.C. and taking on the double-duty both of Osiris's role as a god of the afterlife and the underworld, and of Apis's role as a fertility and strength god, to say nothing of its tendency to absorb the chthonic attributes of other Hellenic deities, such as e.g. Hades and Demeter, linked as they were through a common relationship to Persephone, who was not at all coincidentally the favourite Greek goddess of Rosaline Lalonde.

15 Gentle being a former lounge singer and B-movie actor who in the final years of the B.S. era became leader of the Clean U.S. Party (C.U.S.P.), concerned first in equal measure with manufacturing some horrifically unorthodox confluential amalgam of hard-right assault-rifle enthusiasts and leftist ecoterrorists with decidedly Stalinist sympathies and concomitant resentments but later and more significantly to create by any means necessary (and more often than not by means of the menacingly vague biohazard-suit-clad officers of the Office of Unspecified Services, or U.S.O.U.S.) a Spotless America, however essentially shallow and aesthetic the goal might have been, and whose crusade in the Post-Soviet era to declare the primary opponent of the United States not some external scapegoat but every last specimen of detritus, whether the product of ocean-rusted hulks leaking slick islands of petroleum into the equally garbage-laden harbours of every coastal city in the U.S. of A. or the increasingly poisoned and potentially radioactive-type accretions of filth and waste in desperate need of some kind of removal strategy, resulting in viz. the situation, failing launching the rapidly multiplying landfills into space, gradually morphing into the plan of Territorially Reconfiguring the land north of Syracuse and Ticonderoga and Boston into an indivisible, integral territory of Canada.

16 David Strider, _Can Town_ (B.S. 1996; Houston; Heat and Clockwork Productions). Magnetic video; private release limited to Texas, New Mexico, Arizona.

17 Which was not even his real name to begin with, but which, in the vein of (to the Industry) similarly etymologically difficult Ramón Antonio Gerardo Estévez, otherwise and better known as Martin Sheen, had been mutated almost beyond recognition from José de los Ángeles Agustín Estrada y Ximénez to David Augustine Strider, and which ultimately, despite certain reporting irregularities, had ended up forming the first half of Roxanne and her absent brother Jean Jacques Thierry "Dirk" Joseph (in less elevated parlance simply D.J.)'s compound surnames.

18 If not as overtly violent as the F.L.Q., certainly as angry, and understandably so, given the transformation of their home region from a quiet riverside region on the outskirts of the Canadian capital into a hellish, blighted wasteland.

19 According to Struck, there are no other possibilities for action in _Le Jeu_. "Far beyond prohibited, not to jump at all is regarded as impossible. To _perdre son cœur_ (lose one's heart) and not jump at all is outside _Le Jeu_ 's limit. The possibility simply does not exist. It is unthinkable. Only once, in _Le Jeu du Prochain Train_ 's extensive oral history, has a miner's son not jumped, lost his heart and frozen, remaining on his jut as the round's train passed. This player later drowned. _Perdre son cœur_ , when it is mentioned at all, is known also as _faire un Bernard Wayne_ , in dubious honour of this lone unjumping asbestos miner's son about whom little beyond his subsequent drowning in the Baskatong Reservoir is known, his name denoting a figure of ridicule and disgust among speakers of the Papineau region vulgate." From James A. L. Struck, _A History of Canadian Unpleasantness_ (Boston: Ennet University Press, Y.C.A.T.), p. 1060.

20 Historically, this had been a point of exasperation and frustration for Roxanne, as it had forced her to change her otherwise night-owl tendencies to accommodate the 6:07 A.M. train-whistle alarm clock.

21 Elisabeth K.-R.; she of "five stages" fame.

22 All of these names, Roxanne was sure, had been doled out to at least one unfortunate Québécois child.

23 The contemporary shibboleth denoting residence in the town was a pronunciation something along the lines of "Manchêtre. "

24 Best known for designing the Toronto City Hall, whose completion (as was eerily common of renowned Finnish architects in relation to their _magna opera_ ) he also predeceased.

25 Londoner, not R.P.

26 Roxanne didn't know what she normally drank, but due to the surreal tariffs on import brews Callie's choice had been limited enough that she'd been reduced to Canadian lagers. This, perhaps more than anything, had been Roxanne's clue that Callie had had a problem.

27 In keeping with the nicknaming vernacular of A.A. (in this Québec was no exception), Roxanne came to refer to Callie simply as "English", as in, "Hey, English!", and it was frequent enough that most of the other members came to know her by the same name. Of course, given A.A.'s second A., Roxanne hadn't learned Callie's surname by this time, which was actually honestly English, too, such that to refer to her in encyclopedic-type terms she'd have to be listed under Callie "English" English, English alcoholic, but so anyway years down the line, in Y.G. or around then, Roxanne had finally met with her again and learned the truth, viz. that Callie "English" sported English as a surname on top of all that, and had amused herself for hours considering the maximal number of times the word _English_ could appear all at once, and after some kind of verb coinage had brought her to infinite recursion, she decided the madness was not worth pursuing further, and instead pursued English Callie "English" English.

28 From the Québécois side of her family; there were still concerns from D. A. Strider's Experialist-happy brood that Roxanne's very creation was the product of "a Nuck conspiracy," and thus they'd mostly declined to write her into their wills.

29 Anything north of one, to be perfectly honest.

30 Though Rosaline had always demurred, preferring the Francophone alias _Grande-Cité_ for it, one of Roxanne's unambiguously inherited Strider-type linguistic tendencies was to refer to Montréal as the "Big City," regardless of language. Hence Roxanne S.-L.'s frequent exhortations to Callie, " _Allons à la_ Big City," but with its pronunciation classically Québécois-mangled to something like _bigue-cité_ , which however bewildering Callie had found it she'd also liked.

31 Or 27 minutes and 78 seconds in Q.S.T.  32

32 Québec Standard Time, dividing each day into ten hours, each hour into one hundred minutes, and each minute into one hundred seconds. The Landry government was at the time working itself up with masturbatory excitement at the thought of officially instituting the French Revolutionary Calendar, but his assassination at the hands of the A.F.R. cut the whole mess short.

33 This was discovered after a H.H. resident left a half-eaten pineapple outside sometime in March; though the soil content obviously left the resulting pineapple plant and its fruits hideously and improbably deformed, the proof of concept was enough to encourage another resident, a Swiss botanist and former sommelier (before obvious Substance issues), to begin a more ambitious project to turn Double-H's neat little tropical wasteland plot into the next great wine region of the world, improbably leading to an alcohol recovery facility's monetary sponsorship of one of its residents actively fermenting alcohol on the grounds, but which like given the insane promises of tax-deductible small business income the temptation had really been too great to pass up (the irony of which, Double-H's metaphorical Substance issue towards its viticultural experiment, hadn't been lost on Roxanne and Callie, who had both been in treatment when the Heritage Home Vintage was bottling its first wines).

34 Viz., the United Kingdom's chronic issues with N. Ireland (which Callie later terms, the whole Irish clusterfuck, "England's Québec") and more recently Scotland ("England's Alberta").

35 Following Y.W., and preceding Y.T.-S.D.B.

36 It took about a year before Roxanne honestly learned the whole story about Callie's Issues with alcohol, but even from early on she could tell there was some dark familiar component from i.a. the way she'd talked about her brother. But the story was (and this is what Roxanne had learned, in the Y. of the T.M.P.) that Callie had this brother, whom Callie never referred to as anything other than "my horrible brother" or sometimes "my awful brother", just like that, with some obligatory negative adjective tacked right on the front end of his appellation, and while Roxanne couldn't know for sure given the lack of first-hand experience with the guy she was able to glean a number of facts about him from context clues, or anyway at the very least narrow down the possibilities from near-infinite to something that a human brain could fathom: that he was probably Callie's twin, perhaps even identical from the way that she described him; that he lived off of the misery of others and therefore psychologically profiteered the further he could drive her into alcoholism; that he somehow was _not_ English (though it was only much later, during their chance reunion in the Year of Glad that Roxanne realized that this could have referred not only to his cultural identification but to his surname or that he'd been disowned by the family in some respect). That, after a thorough review of the inconsistencies in her story, especially in the days after their post-Y.G. reconnection, he might not have existed at all, or at least not beyond her mind; that he might have been a characterization provided as an explanatory or coping mechanism for her Substance issues in the first place; that his role as perennial fly in the soup of her progress pre-Y.W. evinced some kind of deeper problem. But after said review, Roxanne had mostly decided that whatever the veracity of Callie's brother's existence, it was perhaps better to let sleeping dogs lie, given especially that after Roxanne's support Callie seemed better now.

37 A word she's picked up of late from her father, onto whom, respectively, it seems to have been rubbed off thanks to a flailing, excessively public courtship of Avril Incandenza, née Mondragon.

38 In the Heideggerian sense, i.e. _Dasein_.

39 Roxanne's inner monologues, anxieties, dreams, and self-imposed psychological coping mechanisms bear strong resemblances to the theoretical constructs of B.S. twentieth-century continental philosophers, though she herself admits it's sort of a chicken-and-the-egg-type scenario, and isn't entirely sure whether she read them because of her experiences with repeated Nietzschean abyss imagery or whether they just looked like that after one too many readings of _Beyond Good and Evil_.

 

 


End file.
